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Lynn Mario de Souza
University of São Paulo, Brazil
Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza is a Senior Full Professor at the Modern Languages Department, University of São Paulo, Brazil. supervising post-graduate research in applied linguistics, language policy, literacy studies, racism, decoloniality and interculturality. Publications in English include co-edited Routledge volumes: Postcolonial Perspectives on Global Citizenship Education (2012) and Glocal Languages and Critical Intercultural Awareness: the south answers back (2019), the recent De-universalizing the decolonial: between parentheses and falling skies and various academic interviews on-line and in various Brazilian journals.
Talk Information:
In Conversation with Sinfree Makoni on "Southernizing Linguistics"
February 17, 2023 | 9:00 AM
In plurilingual realties, it is not simply a case of focusing on different whats or varieties of language; equally significant is a change of focus from language use to language user; this involves the need for an added focus on space, as the locus of plurilingual transactions; for it is in this situated space that the role of language users and their use of resources becomes visible. This change of focus not only reveals the always incomplete and always changing repertoires of linguistic resources (whats) available to these language users, but also reveals the plurilingual ethos (Khubchandani 1997) that operates and sets in motion the use of these resources.
The complexity of such sociolinguistic transactions is only visible if the focus moves from what is being said to how a transaction comes to fruition; and if the focus moves from language to the language user, and from the “merely” linguistic to the ethical.
For further reading/viewing:
Learning to Read the World Through Other Eyes (2008)
Decolonialidade e(m) Linguística Aplicada: Uma entrevista com Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Souza
Academic partnership and balancing hope: a dialogue with Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Souza